Did you know that inbound marketing helps businesses generate 54% more leads than other forms of marketing. At the same time, it costs 62% less per lead when compared with other forms of marketing. Inbound marketing is one of the most popular strategies to grow your business and build long-term relationships with your target audience. It is a methodology that encourages marketers and businesses to create value-adding content that actually helps them position themselves as industry experts. How does a brand become a success and earn credibility? Simply by providing the right solutions to your customer’s issues. This is exactly what the foundation of inbound marketing is about i.e, delivering relevant information to the target audience that targets their pain points and problems.
Inbound marketing works by attracting the right crowd with like-minded goals and vision and by engaging with this community extensively to arrive at a common solution. By doing so, you are empowering each other and hence building credibility as a respectable brand. What makes inbound marketing a brilliant strategy is that it creates an autonomous loop. As you find success, so does your target audience, this, in turn, will attract new prospects and the cycle goes on. Inbound marketing helps in building the much-needed momentum and helps in creating a strong foundation.
Let’s dive a bit deeper and understand what inbound marketing is all about.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing in layman’s terms is a strategy that helps new customers discover your company and already-existing ones with their pain points and problems. This method is different from regular methods of lead generation where the brand image is outwardly pushed on the customer. Inbound marketing shifts focus primarily on visibility and brand awareness which ensures customers search and come to you and not the other way around. This methodology can be defined as a form of “pull marketing” through digital marketing methods such as SEO, content, and hosting events that create value and encourage brand awareness.
What makes inbound marketing work the way it does is the simple fact that people do not feel like they are being sold to rather they feel the solution to their problem is our service hence they reach out to your brand. The content provided in this sense is valuable, educational, and entertaining at the same time, which makes it desirable to potential customers. The goal of a fruitful inbound marketing campaign is ultimately to increase customer reach, increase customer engagement, stimulate quality traffic and of course, greater conversions that are “earned”. When utilized right it gives exponentially better results than conventional digital marketing techniques.
How so?
Inbound marketing is a brilliant strategy to generate leads without requiring businesses to spend their time and efforts reaching out to their customers. And since you’re not reaching out via any outbound tactics, your audience will genuinely interested in what you have to offer and are willing to pay the price to avail of your service.
What Makes Inbound Marketing a Powerful Strategy?
For starters, it gives the power to the customers to decide what they want. It encourages customers to engage with your brand at any time through any medium. It creates a connection between like-minded people who have a common goal to be active and creates a foundation for them to achieve it together. Inbound marketing oftentimes is confused with the likes of outbound marketing. While inbound marketing is mainly focused on attracting valuable customers, outbound marketing is pushing the brand onto potential customers, who may or may not be interested in your brand. It’s about “earning” the spotlight while outbound marketing is “buying” it.
How Does it Work?
Inbound marketing is almost entirely based on the content you put out there. The more the time and resources invested into producing great content, the greater are your results. Creating killer content is the way into the hearts of the people as well into the heart of success. A successful campaign includes tracking your performance and constantly revising and improving your approach – there is always room for improvement. It is up to you to ensure you have an inkling of what your target audience wants and how best to deliver it to them.
5 Benefits of Inbound Marketing You Should Know About
While we have established the fact that inbound marketing has more weightage compared to traditional marketing strategies, here is a brief description of the benefits of inbound marketing to help you understand the methodology better:
- Draws Quality Organic Traffic
- Extensively Budget-Friendly
- Long Term & Self Sustaining
- Helps Build Credibility & Customer Relationships
- Opportunity for Growth
Draws Quality Organic Traffic
One of the main advantages is the quality of leads generated. According to Content Marketing Institute, inbound marketing generates 3x more leads per dollar than traditional marketing strategies. The leads generated are genuine, informed clientele. Because of the more funnelled approach of inbound marketing, the leads generated are authentic and are interested in your service.
Budget-Friendly
Conventional digital mass marketing requires a lot of effort not to mention a huge amount of money for it to be a success. Inbound marketing is easier on your budget as it is more focused and content-oriented. With this strategy not only do you save money but also experience higher ROI over time. However, it’s important to note that quality content is expensive to get produced externally. So, if you’re looking forward to building genuinely high-quality content pieces for your content marketing efforts, you’ll will need to consider how much can be produced in-house, and how much needs to be produced externally.
Long Term & Self Sustaining
Over time, it’s a method that grants greater ROIs. In comparison to outbound marketing which only lasts as long as the campaign, inbound marketing does not have an expiration date. The material generated through inbound marketing is available online for those willing to seek it. Since the success of is based on organic traffic, it invariably generates a loop where new leads are generated based on customers who are happy with your service.
Helps Build Credibility & Customer Relations
The principle which makes inbound marketing a success story is the bed of credibility it is built on. Generally, marketing sales are entirely based on data and information and not focused on value and customer relations. With inbound strategies, a brand is given the chance to interact and engage with customers to provide the solution to their problems thus building relations over a common goal. This aspect helps create a healthy rapport between clients and the brand which is very valuable. This type of marketing is unique and fruitful in this angle as trust and credibility go hand in hand with brand image and brand success.
Opportunity For Growth
As this strategy constantly needs improvement there is always the “push” to grow and become better as a brand. By engaging with customers constantly and encouraging feedback, your brand has the opportunity to evolve and track your performance on the run. With inbound marketing, there is always constant evolution for a brand if the opportunity is utilised.
3 Tips Businesses Should Consider in 2022
We have a clear idea of what inbound marketing is and how beneficial it is to a brand in today’s digital marketing scenario. Moving on, here are three tips to help you get started on your journey. Here goes:
- Have a Well-Defined Business Goal & Approach
- Create Content for Every Stage
- Choosing the Right Delivery Platforms
Have a Well-Defined Business Goal & Approach
Goal and target audience are synonymous with each other. Defining and understanding your goals shared with the target audience is the first and primal step towards your inbound marketing strategy. Constantly learn and improvise the approach you are going to use. Research is the key to understanding what your audience wants and it is important to put in the hours into research to gain the end result.
Create Content for Every Stage
This tip ensures that the traffic generated is constant and results in a self-sustaining loop. Transformational inbound marketing requires valuable comet provided at every stage to attract and retain customers. It is also important to personalise the content provided and ensure it is of relevance since the content has transformational value more than anything. Great content often gets lost if not executed on the right platform. Choosing the appropriate platform, especially in inbound marketing is of paramount importance. You will have to analyze which is the best way and platform to deliver the content ecstasy to the target audience. The more the research the more likely the success.
Conclusion
Inbound marketing is a completely different genre and approach to marketing. It is a long-term marketing strategy but offers greater results and helps in building brand image and credibility immensely. The strategy is entirely based on the content created, and the way it’s presented to the target audience. The more valuable the content, the more likely you are to win over the audience. Unlike outbound marketing, customers are “earned” through constant efforts and this is directly reflected in the ROI charts of the brand.
It is a long-term approach that creates a robust relationship between the customer and the brand. A strong foundation built on common goals and a target mindset is is both the stepping stone of any company in growth as well as inbound marketing. It allows you to earn the audience and hence has much more value in comparison to conventional marketing methodologies.
